Renewed amplification of their voices came last week in the form of a technical snafu that disrupted two days of test-taking and thrust CTB/McGraw-Hill and its $95 million administration contract into the spotlight.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Glenda Ritz, known for not sharing predecessor Tony Bennett’s enthusiasm for heavy-handed testing, pointedly told educators and parents that the double-checking of the scores is especially critical in light of the extra weight now resting on them.

Make that excess weight.

Long the bane of educators for the precious weeks it consumes in preparation and the dire consequences a few poor numbers could wreak, ISTEP is bigger and scarier than ever in this era of simplistic and punitive education reform.

Ritz has pushed back with her mantra of teaching-time-over-testing-time, but the Democrat is up against Republican forces that have set ISTEP’s supremacy in place.

Her office stresses that its focus now is on getting this round of ISTEP done, accurately and completely.

“But there should be a conversation about these high-stakes tests we’re asking our children to take,” said her spokesman, Daniel Altman. “And it’s not just kids; it’s teachers, administrators, parents, the whole community.”

Recent legislatures and the State Board of Education, following Bennett’s lead, have made this single standardized annual test a key factor in the A-F grading of schools, the performance appraisals of teachers as well as students, and even the issuance of vouchers (for those fleeing “failing” schools). And ISTEP doesn’t even test half of what schools teach.

“There is a huge emphasis on ISTEP, and I believe our organization would say it’s too great,” said Joel Hand, chief lobbyist for the Indiana Coalition for Public Education, an advocacy group formed to defend public schools from what members see as politically motivated privatization.

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The test, he said, “has become a large driver of public policy and education policy, and that has trickled down to the local level. From the position of the coalition, we believe any decision made currently about the letter grades of schools is fatally flawed until the A-F system is revamped.”

For example, he said, by testing more subjects. ISTEP skips social studies, art, even (for all the infatuation with high technology) science.

Another common criticism by educators is that ISTEP overlooks differing challenges faced by schools and students. Many would prefer it put more emphasis on the individual child’s progress against himself and less on how he compares to the kid next door or on the next continent.

Ironically, says Gerardo Gonzalez, dean of the Indiana University School of Education, those nations the United States would most like to emulate tend to test less often and to test more for diagnosis than for rankings. Also ironically, high-performing countries such as Finland, Singapore and South Korea send teachers to the U.S. to learn from “one of the most creative generations anywhere.” He fears that creativity may be stifled by the new test mania’s narrowing effect on curricula.

“We’ve become really obsessed with standardized test results both as a state and as a nation,” Gonzalez observed. “A single test cannot be expected to do all the things we’ve been aligning with it. Many things affect tests scores -- the home, the school, technical delays and failures such as we had last week -- and yet we’re trying to influence things far removed from the outcome of those tests.”

Parents, he said, may be the hope for turning the tide toward clearer perspective.

“Parents want to know how their kids are doing. But with more and more emphasis on the standardized test, they’re beginning to realize, ‘Wait a minute. I see the anxiety my child is experiencing and how the results are used to appraise him, his teacher and his school. This is not everything education is about. Test scores are not what my kid is about.’ Their frustration will carry great weight.”

As do tests, now. That’s why bad news – about screw-ups, cheating, costs – is big news. In so many ways, smaller would be better.

“I’m not anti-testing,” Gonzalez said. “It absolutely has a role in assessing certain things. But we’ve got to realize it plays just a small part in what a well-rounded education needs to be.”